Jakub Jelinek wrote : > > > Background: Some folks have started to add i686-built application > > > packages in addition to i386-built packages to Fedora Extras, > > > claiming these i686-built, "optimized packages" would result into > > > much better performance of these packages ("up to factor 2"). > > > > those optimized packages aren't faster; at least I find it hard to > > believe.... esp on p4 and athlon cpus where cmov is no gain again ;) > > Well, SSE/SSE2 can help for graphic/video/audio applications. > But there .i686.rpm doesn't help you, either the application > selects whether to use SSE/SSE2 or not at runtime, or the packages can > have separate sse2 and normal libs in one package: > /usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 > /usr/lib/sse2/libfoo.so.1 This is "the proper way" for sure, but there are quite a few of (mostly multimedia) projects out there that hardcode MMX/SSE support at compile time, rather than enabling it at runtime when built for the x86 architecture :-( Matthias -- Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/ Fedora Core release 2 (Tettnang) - Linux kernel 2.6.8-1.521 Load : 1.16 1.05 1.01